Heaven Before Me

continued

To receive course credit, each student had to write a paper based on an original piece of research. My project, I decided, would be to determine whether the dozens of sphinxes lining the walls all curled their tails to the right.

Yes.

It was far too simple an observation even to think of submitting to the eminent Egyptologist at whose arrival in the lecture room all rose reverently. But my survey of sphinx tails led to the same discovery about the other artifacts in those basement rooms. These were standardized products. They were not art objects; the goal was not originality. The beautiful things placed in and around Egyptian tombs were tools for use in the next world.

It was my introduction, as I say, to the preposterous belief in life beyond the grave. And such unquestioning belief! Here was a brilliant civilization devoting the lion's share of its energy and wealth to preparations for a mythical afterworld!

Armed with books on ancient Egypt from the nearby stalls along the Seine, I continued my solitary explorations in the Louvre basement. Egyptians, it seemed, could prepare so minutely for the next world because it was going to be just like this one. Only, of course, requiring longer-lasting materials. One book showed photographs of the huge step pyramid at Saqqara, not only the largest building ever erected up to that time, but the first one made of stone. All around it, in an immense stone city of the dead, were offices, storehouses, stables, workshops, temples, officials' dwellings. It was an exact replica, on a far vaster, more permanent scale, of the merely temporary mudbrick city of the living nearby.

The more I read, the more the subject of an afterworld took on the appeal of a fairy tale; over the next few years, I traced quaint ideas about it through many cultures. What a universal idea life after death apparently was! Universal, too, to place it in an earthlike setting. From our hunting ancestors who buried their dead with bows and arrows, to the Chinese emperor interred with an army of life-sized clay soldiers, the afterlife was to be a continuation of this one.

People took along their horses, dogs, servants, wives - often killing them for the purpose. They brought food and cooking pots. The ancient Greek took a coin for the boatman who would ferry him across the River Styx.

If one's deeds in this life were good, the next life was conceived as pleasant. For Native Americans, the Happy Hunting Ground. For Greeks and Romans, an endless banquet. It would be the world they knew, minus its negatives. To the desert dweller, paradise was a watered garden. To the Norse warrior, Valhalla offered glorious battles with wounds that healed overnight.

Studying myths of the afterworld became for me a kind of hobby.